One of the features of the oral Russian speech of bilingual speakers of the indigenous languages of Russia is the omission / the overuse of the “reflexive” affix -sʲa (a “middle voice” marker with a wide range of uses including reflexive, reciprocal, anticausative, passive, and some others). We discuss the data on the nonstandard use of -sʲa in the Russian speech of bilingual speakers of two language groups that differ both from Russian and from each other in this grammatical domain: Samoyedic (Forest Enets, Nganasan, and Nenets) and Tungusic (Nanai and Ulch). The data come from the corpus of contact-influenced Russian speech, which is being created by our team. We show that the mismatches in standard and nonstandard usage cannot be explained by direct structural copying from the donor language (indigenous) to the recipient one (the local variety of Russian). Nor is there a consistent system which differs from standard Russian since there are many more usages that follow the rules of standard Russian. The influence of the indigenous languages explains some overuses and omissions; the others can be explained by other factors, e.g., difficulties in the acquisition of verb pairs with non-transparent semantic or syntactic relations.
This paper describes the discourse functions of the 3rd singular possessive marker in Hill Mari. Many previous works indicated that POSS.3SG markers in the Uralic languages express the semantics of definiteness; contrastive uses were also mentioned for Mari and Permic languages. Indeed, in Hill Mari, POSS.3SG primarily marks contrast (selection from a set) rather than definiteness. The acceptability of this marker depends on the status of NPs in the information structure. It can mark a topic, and it also has a contrastive use — both in topic and in focus. This use is typical of specific NPs. However, if this NP is a contrastive topic or, less often, a contrastive focus, the possessive marker is also possible in non-specific NPs. Using Hawkins’ terms: in definite contexts (anaphoric use, associative anaphoric use, immediate situation use, larger situation use), it is felicitous only in a (contrastive) topic, but not in focus. The influence of the information structure is only absent in the context of the selection from a set. It is the idea of the selection from a set that unites the functions of the POSS.3SG marker in its discourse uses. At the NP level, this is the choice of a referent from a set of participants. Contrastive topic and focus are also analyzed as a selection from several alternatives. As for the topic shift, a new topic is similarly selected from a variety of possible options in discourse, activated in the minds of the speaker and the hearer, and when marking the protagonist, the choice occurs from the set of all protagonists acting in various fragments of the discourse. Thus, the same marker encodes similar semantics in Hill Mari at the levels of NP, local, and global discourse structure.
The paper describes coordinating and comitative constructions in Northern Mansi. It examines the following coordinating markers: the additive item os ‘ADD’, the lexeme tuwəl ‘then’, and the marker -ɣ ‘DU’ as well as the comitative postposition jot ‘COM’ and the instrumental marker -(ə)l, -təl. It shows that the items os and tuwəl do not impose restrictions on the number and part-of-speech attribution of conjuncts and can coordinate nouns with modifiers. In some idiolects, the basic NP coordinating strategy is to use tuwəl, while os is more restricted and primarily used as an additive particle. The double dual marker can only coordinate two NPs without modifiers. Its main function is to coordinate symmetrical pairs denoting objects that often occur together (e.g., mother and father, daughter and son). The postposition jot is used in the genuine comitative construction as well as in the actant, coordinat-ing, and inclusory constructions. In some idiolects, it is also used in copredicative constructions. The distribution of the instrumental case marker in the comitative function is very limited: it is only used in coordinating and inclusory constructions. In this case, it can be preceded by the dual possessive marker, which refers to both NPs. Furthermore, unlike the postposition jot, the instrumental case marker cannot be attached to pronouns. In coordinating comitative constructions, these markers can coordinate less symmetrical pairs denoting objects that often occur together (for example, mother and daughter).
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